A Bad Day for the New World Order

New York police boarded the first-class cabin of an Air France jet bound for Paris to collar Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, a Grand Master of the Universe and the Socialist Party’s hope to defeat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.

Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known, was hauled back to New York and identified in a police lineup by an African maid at the Sofitel hotel as the man who emerged stark naked from the bathroom of his $3,000-a-night suite and tried to rape her.

DSK’s political allies are howling entrapment. Yet his rap sheet is long. Called the Great Seducer, he was charged with the sexual harassment of a co-worker at the IMF and accused by a young French novelist of behaving like a “rutting chimpanzee” and trying to rape her when she contacted him about a book she was writing in 2002.

The novelist, Tristan Banon, now 31, is a goddaughter to DSK’s second wife. She took a lawyer’s advice not to file charges then. But, says the Guardian, Banon is about to file them now.

Monday, The New York Times wrote, “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”